India urges G7 nation to take effective steps to address triple planetary crisis

New Delhi: Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Bhupender Yadav said India is looking forward to the leadership of G7 Nations to ensure an effective fight against the triple challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.

Speaking at the Plenary Session at the G7 Ministers’ Meeting on Climate, Energy and Environment in Sapporo, Japan Yadav said “it will be important to ensure a country-driven approach along with the principles of equity and CBDR-RC to undertake decisive action”.

“At the same time the voice of the global South needs to be recognised for a truly global leadership of G7 and to receive valuable inputs towards implementation of G7 initiatives” he said.

He said protecting and restoring ecosystems can help us reduce the extent of climate change and cope with its impacts.

” it is therefore important that we address issues related to climate change in tandem with environmental action, holistically” he said.

Yadav said “We do hope that this is at the core of deliberations of this meeting of the Climate, Energy and Environment Ministers of the G7 Countries”.

The Minister said very recently at the CBD conference in Montreal we adopted the Global Biodiversity Framework and at CoP27 at Sharm el Sheikh, landmark decisions on issues like the Loss and Damage fund were taken. However, there still is a long way to go”.

The Union Minister said India in its Presidency of G-20, for example, has taken this approach and embedded mitigation and adaptation deeply across priority areas of arresting land degradation, accelerating ecosystem restoration, and enriching biodiversity.

Meanwhile, the G7 pledged on Sunday to quit fossil fuels faster and urged other countries to follow suit, but failed to agree to any new deadlines on ending polluting power sources like coal.
Ministers from the G7 group of advanced democracies are gathering in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo for two days of meetings on climate, energy and environmental policy.

The issues of renewable sources of fuel and energy security have taken on new urgency following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

After two days of talks in the northern city of Sapporo, the bloc’s climate and environment ministers vowed to “accelerate the phase-out of unabated fossil fuels so as to achieve net zero in energy systems by 2050 at the latest… and call on others to join us in taking the same action”.